Apple's New Patent Barrage

The US Patent & Trademark Office has awarded a truckload of patents, some of them seemingly trivial, from continuous scrolling acceleration on the iPhone to the burn disc icon user interface in iTunes, which was imagined by Steve Jobs himself.

• That patent, by Jobs and Tim Wasko, refers to an icon with three states of operation, like in iTunes CD burning. First you can see the burn icon. When the user clicks it, the system gets ready to burn and shows a second icon. When the user clicks that second icon, the burning operation starts, and the icon changes into a third icon, showing the progress. Its objective is to avoid accidental operation by one click.
• System for reducing number of programs needed to render an image, so it uses less memory and processing power.
• User interface to improve media item searching, which adapts your search bar options to the type of media you are browsing.
• Interface morphing between two views of data.
• Continuous list acceleration - the stuff you experience when you scroll up and down the list of contacts.
• Display of search results before the user even submits the search, which is what you see when you start typing in Safari's search field (but also on other browsers and even Google).
• Split video edits (which was invented by Final Cut Pro genius-in-charge Randy Ubillos.
• One of the patent refers to several methods for inputting information, created by Avie Tevanian himself, the creator of the NeXT and Mac OS X Mach kernel, who left Apple in 2006 when he was Chief Software Technology officer.
• User interface for the hierarchical selection of items.

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